OT: American Politics

zeke said:

Roland B. Hedley Jr. @RealRBHJr
1h
POTUS often accused of being post-literate, but today he laid out several very complicated Conspiracy Theories in only six tweets. I have compiled them below in the powerful essay he would've composed had schedule permitted.

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zeke said:

lol


Kaitlan Collins @kaitlancollins
Mnuchin on Fox, "We have agreed to put the tariffs on hold while we try to execute the framework.” Adds: “We’re putting the trade war on hold."

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lecoqsportif said:

Flailing clown show. To be expected at this point, obviously.

It’s the Willie Loman presidency.

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WASHINGTON — President Trump, increasingly concerned that his summit meeting in Singapore next month with North Korea’s leader could turn into a political embarrassment, has begun pressing his aides and allies about whether he should take the risk of proceeding with a historic meeting that he had leapt into accepting, according to administration and foreign officials.

Mr. Trump was both surprised and angered by a statement issued on Wednesday by the North’s chief nuclear negotiator, who declared that the country would never trade away its nuclear weapons capability in exchange for economic aid, administration officials said. The statement, while a highly familiar tactic by the North, represented a jarring shift in tone after weeks of conciliatory gestures.

On Thursday and Friday, Mr. Trump peppered aides with questions about the wisdom of proceeding, and on Saturday night he called President Moon Jae-in of South Korea to ask why the North’s public statement seemed to contradict the private assurances that Mr. Moon had conveyed after he met Kim Jong-un, the 35-year-old dictator of the North, at the Demilitarized Zone in late April.

The president’s conversation with Mr. Moon, which was first reported by The Washington Post, came just three days before the South Korean leader was scheduled to arrive in Washington to meet with Mr. Trump on Tuesday. It was a sign of Mr. Trump’s discomfort, some officials speculated, that he could not wait to discuss the issue until Mr. Moon arrived for his meetings here, though there is no indication that the president is considering pulling out of the North Korea talks.

Mr. Trump’s aides have grown concerned that the president — who has said that “everyone thinks” he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts — has signaled that he wants the summit meeting too much. The aides also worry that Mr. Kim, sensing the president’s eagerness, is prepared to offer assurances that will fade over time.

Moreover, Mr. Trump’s decision this month to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal raises the stakes for the North Korea negotiation. If he emerges with anything less than what President Barack Obama got, which in Iran included the verified shipment of 97 percent of all nuclear material out of the country, it will be hard for Mr. Trump to convince anyone other than his base that the negotiation was a success.

The aides are also concerned about what kind of grasp Mr. Trump has on the details of the North Korea program, and what he must insist upon as the key components of denuclearization. Mr. Moon and his aides reported that Mr. Kim seemed highly conversant with all elements of the program when the two men met, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made similar comments about Mr. Kim, based on his two meetings with him in Pyongyang, the North’s capital.

But aides who have recently left the administration say Mr. Trump has resisted the kind of detailed briefings about enrichment capabilities, plutonium reprocessing, nuclear weapons production and missile programs that Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush regularly sat through.

Grappling with North Korea in negotiations is a new experience not just for Mr. Trump, but also for everyone else in the upper ranks of his administration. South Korean officials say that John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s new national security adviser, has been in near daily contact with his counterpart in Seoul, trying to work out a strategy.

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Mr. Bolton has been clear that in his view the president should use the Singapore meeting to declare that the North must give up its entire arsenal and nuclear infrastructure before crippling economic sanctions are eased.

The South has been advocating a more traditional confidence-building approach, in which concessions by the North result in a gradual lifting of sanctions. But Mr. Trump has said he will not repeat that technique, because it led to failure by his four immediate predecessors.

Until now, administration officials have been saying they expect Mr. Kim to agree to denuclearization at the Singapore summit meeting and to set a schedule for a fast down payment over the next six months, which would involve turning over some number of nuclear weapons, closing production facilities and allowing inspectors to range the country.

Those who have dealt with North Korea most intensively say that expectation will have to be scaled back if Mr. Trump expects success.

“If Trump is truly expecting to see a handover of nuclear weapons in six months, without anything in return, that is very unrealistic,” said Joseph Yun, the State Department’s North Korea coordinator until he retired a few months ago. He predicted that Mr. Trump would be forced into the kind of step-by-step measures that his predecessors attempted, “because there is no other way.”

Mr. Pompeo said on ABC News late last month: “This administration has its eyes wide open. We know the history. We know the risks.” He said the only measure of success would be “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” a phrase first used in the Bush administration, for which it proved unattainable.

Analysts at the C.I.A., where Mr. Pompeo was director before becoming secretary of state, have warned for years that they do not believe that Mr. Kim would trade away all of his nuclear weapons capability, no matter what the offer from the United States and its allies. But they have said there was a chance that he would suspend testing and give up some of the North’s capability — as long as it could be rapidly rebuilt — if he could win the removal of much of the American presence in the region.

Mr. Bolton has repeatedly cited the case of Libya, which turned over all of its nuclear-related equipment in 2003, as a model to follow for denuclearization. Libya received promises of economic integration with the West, little of which happened.

In 2011, its leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was overthrown, dragged from a ditch and killed. The North Koreans noticed, and much of the statement issued last week was a denunciation of Mr. Bolton and a vow never to bend to “great powers” seeking a similar deal.

But when reporters asked Mr. Trump about Libya, he managed, in one stroke, to contradict Mr. Bolton and misconstrue the importance of the trade of the nuclear program for economic rewards.

“The Libyan model isn’t a model that we have at all, when we’re thinking of North Korea,” Mr. Trump said. “If you look at that model with Qaddafi, that was a total decimation. We went in there to beat him.” That referred to Western military intervention in 2011, not to the nuclear disarmament that came eight years before.

“Now that model would take place if we don’t make a deal, most likely,” Mr. Trump warned, seeming to repeat exactly the threat that the North Koreans had warned against. “But if we make a deal, I think Kim Jong-un is going to be very, very happy.”

Mr. Trump may be right: Mr. Kim presumably has many decades ahead of him as North Korea’s leader and has much to gain from improved economic conditions. But he would be betting his entire country on any nuclear deal, and most intelligence analyses in recent years have cast doubt that he, or the North Korean elite, would be willing to give up the security provided by nuclear arms.

Michael Green, a professor at Georgetown University and a leading expert on Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in Foreign Affairs that Mr. Kim was looking for something much larger than Mr. Trump was.

“Trump may be preparing for the wrong game: a two-player round of checkers when Kim is steeling for a multiplayer two-board chess match,” he wrote. “On one board will be the future of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, what Trump came to negotiate. On the other will be what Kim and the other participants know is also crucially at stake: the future of geopolitics in northeast Asia.” Mr. Kim sees himself as a player in that game long after the Trump administration is over.

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Altair said:

Only mildly successful when you consider how much of the money they got freed up went into middle east interventions.

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But it did keep them from advancing their nuclear program.

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But if the US stops doing business with any company that does business with Iran, there isn't much Europe can do.

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Juncker told reporters in Sofia that EU leaders decided Wednesday night to activate the so-called blocking statute, which bans European companies from complying with the U.S. sanctions against Iran.

“We have the duty, the Commission and the European Union, to protect our European businesses,” said Juncker, adding: “We must act now and we will act now. That’s why we are launching the process to use the 1996 ‘blocking statute’ to neutralize the extraterritorial effects of U.S. sanctions on European companies … We will do that tomorrow morning at 10:30.”

The blocking statute would forbid EU companies, under threat of punishment, to cancel business ties with Iran because of the U.S. sanctions. To do that, the EU will need to update the law to include Donald Trump’s sanctions, a process that could take up to two months, depending on how fast the European Parliament and Council vote on the update. EU countries need to approve the text by a qualified majority, meaning skeptics like Germany alone would not be able to veto the law.

Juncker also said that leaders have decided “to allow the European Investment Bank to facilitate European companies’ investment in Iran.” This means that the investment bank could potentially issue loans for companies that might no longer be covered by European banks, which are expected to withdraw their operations from Iran out of fear of consequences for their business with the United States.

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mbow30 said:

how many big global companies aren't trading in some way with the US market? it's by far the largest consumer market in the world. i'm sure there are some examples, but probably not very many.

what about US companies that are having to cancel contracts now with iran now? i think boeing was one of them. they can't be too happy...

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mbow30 said:

iran's was pouring money into destabilization campaigns well before 2015.

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lecoqsportif said:

The gun manufacturers should pay for all the proposed metal detectors in the schools. Arseholes.

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Habsy said:

Or each state could impose its own tax on guns to do so. They could even require yearly or bi-yearly permit fees. They have hefty taxes on gas, smokes and booze, why not guns?

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Habsy said:

Or each state could impose its own tax on guns to do so. They could even require yearly or bi-yearly permit fees. They have hefty taxes on gas, smokes and booze, why not guns?

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To do that, the California businessman had helped spearhead a secret campaign to influence the White House and Congress, flooding Washington with political donations.

Broidy and his business partner, Lebanese-American George Nader, pitched themselves to the crown princes as a backchannel to the White House, passing the princes’ praise — and messaging — straight to the president’s ears.

Now, in December 2017, Broidy was ready to be rewarded for all his hard work.

It was time to cash in.

In return for pushing anti-Qatar policies at the highest levels of America’s government, Broidy and Nader expected huge consulting contracts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, according to an Associated Press investigation based on interviews with more than two dozen people and hundreds of pages of leaked emails between the two men. The emails reviewed by the AP included work summaries and contracting documents and proposals.

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